Eritrea: Refugees and Responsibility

Editor's Note

"If refugee flows are a sign of political meltdown, then
Eritrea is a level seven nuclear disaster. Figures from the
United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees indicate that
Eritrea, with a population of only about five million, has
been among the top ten refugee producing countries in the
world for the better part of the decade." - Tricia Redeker
Hepner

According to data from the UNHCR (2009 Global Trends,
available at http://www.unhcr.org/pages/49c3646c4d6.html),
there were almost 210,000 refugees from Eritrea in that year,
of whom only 2,500 benefited from UNHCR refugee resettlement
programs that year. The case of Eritrea, Hepner argues, is an
indicator not only of desperate conditions within Eritrea, but
also of the structural failure of the international refugee
system to find sustainable solutions for long-term refugees.

A similar failure is evident in the report by the Guardian on
May 9 that NATO ships ignored the plight of a stranded ship of
African migrants, including Ethiopians, Eritreans, and others,
seeking to flee Libya, resulting in the death of 63 of the 72
persons on board. Migrants stranded in Libya include both
nationalities already having refugee status in Libya and
workers in Libya now fleeing the latest violence there and now
seeking asylum as refugees. Despite alarmist rhetoric from
Italian leaders, in fact only a small minority of those
fleeing Libya have yet attempted to reach Europe rather than
fleeing to neighboring countries see earlier AfricaFocus
Bulletins at http://www.africafocus.org/migrexp.php).
Nevertheless, there have already been hundreds, and perhaps
thousands, lost at sea.

According to the latest reports, the Libyan government is now
actively encouraging migrants to take to sea in vessels that
are not seaworthy, adding to the number taking this dangerous
alternative.

International agencies as well as migrants' rights activists
have called both for an investigation of the failure of NATO
ships to respond and for stepped-up international coordination
to locate and rescue those attempting to escape Libya by sea.

This AfricaFocus Bulletin contains Hefner's reflection on the
situation of Eritrean refugees, as Eritrea approaches its 20th
anniversary of independence later this month, and a press
release from Human Rights Watch on the report of NATO failure
to respond to ships in danger on the Mediterranean carrying
African migrants from Libya.

Other sources of interest, both for background and for current
news, include

Human tsunamis and the world refugee system

Tricia Redeker Hepner is Associate Professor of Anthropology
at the University of Tennessee, Chair of the Migration and
Refugee Studies Division of the Center for the Study of Social
Justice, and Eritrea Country Specialist for Amnesty
International and The Fahamu Refugee Network. She can be
reached at thepner@utk.edu

The dictatorship in Eritrea results in large numbers of people
feeling the country. But once they enter the international
refugee system their problems are only just beginning, writes
Tricia Redeker Hepner.

... The Northeast African nation of Eritrea marks its 20th
year of independence [in May]. But the festivities will be
marred by mourning. President Isayas Afwerki remains firmly
entrenched in the seat of power, claiming with alacrity to
have foretold the groundswell overtaking his Arab neighbors
while banning television coverage of the demonstrations and
reorganising the military to pre-empt a possible coup.

Meanwhile, the ripples radiating from the epicenter of his
brutal regime are unrelenting, and the fallout has a human
face. Tens of thousands of men, women, and children have fled
Eritrea in wave after wave of despair. While some of these
refugees make it to the shores of Europe and North America,
many more do not.

Last week, two boats carrying 400 Eritreans and Ethiopians
from Libya to Italy disappeared in the Mediterranean Sea.
Fishermen and the Coast Guard are still recovering the bodies
... In the Sinai desert, traffickers of multiple nationalities
work in tandem with security forces of Egypt and Eritrea to
extort, exploit, abuse, torture and execute refugees seeking
to cross into Israel, where they are summarily labeled
'infiltrators' in a euphemistic avoidance of international
responsibilities to protect asylum seekers.

If refugee flows are a sign of political meltdown, then
Eritrea is a level seven nuclear disaster. Figures from the
United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees indicate that
Eritrea, with a population of only about five million, has
been among the top ten refugee producing countries in the
world for the better part of the decade. In 2006, it ranked
second in the world. In 2007 only Somalis and Iraqis lodged
more asylum applications than Eritreans, and in 2008 the
numbers of claims filed by Eritreans exceeded those of Iraqis.

The reason? Eritrea spends a whopping 20 per cent of its
national budget maintaining a military comprised of forced
conscripts whose virtually unpaid labour is reinvested in
further militarisation of the society and economy. The
Constitution has been on ice since 1997, the promise of multiparty
elections remains unfulfilled and even North Korea
boasts greater freedom of the press. Civil society
institutions and competing political parties exist only in
exile.

The list of human rights abuses characterising daily life in
Eritrea is longer than the number of international conventions
the government has signed. Torture, rape, and execution are
commonplace for those who dare put up a fight. The result?
Massive flight. "Is there a worse country in the world than
this?" mused a Texas lawyer representing one of the hundreds
of Eritrean asylum seekers in the US as we reviewed his
client's case.

As an anthropologist who has lived in Eritrea and worked with
Eritrean communities in Europe, Africa, and the US for years,
I dearly want to defend this country. But the best I can do is
to help defend its displaced, abused, and often forgotten
citizens. Together with lawyers, Eritrean activists, human
rights organisations, UNHCR staff, and colleagues like Magnus
Treiber and Barbara Harrell-Bond, I struggle to place the
people of this small African country on the global crisis
radar. It's a tall order in these days of perpetual disasters
and mind-numbing statistics.

...

But human experience is what anthropologists are always after
- how to put life and breath and flesh onto the cold bones of
statistics; how to illustrate the concrete meanings of
political violence and migration policies and practices as
people live them. Among such human experiences are those of
nineteen members of the elite Air Force of Eritrea who fled to
Sudan a couple of years ago, risking the 'shoot-to-kill'
policy of the Eritrean government - as hundreds of others do
every month - seeking to cross the nearest international
border.

In Sudan, they registered with the UNHCR and began seeking
both refugee protection and resettlement abroad. Their highranking
and symbolically significant position as the pride of
the Eritrean Defence Forces made them more vulnerable to
persecution and punishment by the Eritrean government than
many of the 100,000-plus Eritrean refugees in Khartoum.
However, some of these men used to be soldiers with the
guerrilla movement that is now the Eritrean government. They
have scant hope of ever being accepted by the US or Canada the
two largest refugee-receiving countries in the world because
under some very broad terms of the US Patriot Act and
a similar Canadian law, they are considered 'terrorists'. This
is because they took up arms in an anti-colonial liberation
struggle against the Ethiopian government more than 30 years
ago.

Others in the group are young men who were conscripted.
Despite their elite positions, their fate was hardly better
than most others in the military and their exit signaled
refusal of the sort of complicity that makes life more
bearable in such conditions. However, these men are also in
for a long and treacherous series of legal obstacles due to
international reluctance to recognise military deserters and a
2002 policy adopted by the UNHCR rendering ex-combatants
ineligible for resettlement.

Similarly, clauses that exclude those who may have
participated in human rights violations or persecution of
others also present stumbling blocks when applied to real
conditions. Virtually every soldier in the Eritrean military
has been forced to guard or repress another soldier or
civilian at some point, and the majority of Eritrean refugees
have been soldiers. The very structure and social organisation
of militarisation and political repression in Eritrea blur the
neat legal distinction between persecuted and persecutor so
critical in refugee and asylum determination procedures. Even
the US Supreme Court got drawn in, when the asylum claim of a
former conscript named Daniel Negusie was denied because his
assignment as a prison guard - punishment for his own
dissidence by the Eritrean government - suggested he was
complicit in the harm of others.

In the meantime, the 19 men wait in Khartoum, where Eritrean
security officials operate with impunity. On any given day,
they may be attacked by an agent of their own government,
kidnapped and taken back to Eritrea, or, at the very least,
shaken down and extorted by Sudanese police or soldiers,
perhaps beaten and jailed for being unwanted migrants.

Should the UNHCR take the situation seriously and realise
these men need protection - an unlikely showing of concern for
individuals by a bureaucracy whose esteemed reputation is
outshined only by its impersonality, impenetrability, and
unaccountability - they may be taken to a refugee camp, where
they will still be subject to many of the same pressures, only
in more concentrated form. This is glossed as 'protection',
even a 'solution', though it is hardly that.

While camps in places like Sudan and Ethiopia may comply with
UNHCR policy, they are administered by host country agencies
and staff, some of whom inevitably participate in the abuse
and misuse of refugees, often under the noses of international
staff. A trip to the food distribution center may end in rape
and a place in the resettlement queue can be bought (or lost)
for a hundred thousand birr [Ethiopian currency].

In Shimelba Refugee Camp, in northern Ethiopia, the UNHCR
compound is open only a few hours per week, as impervious to
refugees' pleas for help as President Isayas Afwerki is to
political transition.

If elite air force men cannot gain the attention of UNHCR,
then the situation is far worse for the average person. Some
refugees get sick of waiting - who wouldn't? - and take their
chances. But the routes to escape are toxic. If they make it
through the Libyan desert to reach the Mediterranean and
finally to Malta or Lampedusa, which only a handful do, new
problems arise at the gates of Fortress Europe. Are they
really political refugees or just impoverished economic
migrants? How will a country like Malta - swamped with tens of
thousands of refugees - manage to decide their fate? If they
move on to another European country, they face imprisonment
and deportation under the Dublin II regulation. Consumer
values may tout individual initiative and choice but do not
extend to 'asylum shopping', thank you very much.

Those who have the connections and money might hire a
smuggler, usually for tens of thousands of dollars, who will
take them on a risky and tortuous journey to Southern Africa,
then Brazil, through Colombia or Venezuela, perhaps Cuba, then
Nicaragua, Guatemala, and finally Mexico, where stuffed in the
cargo bay of a bus, or in the custody of a coyote, they will
cross the border of the US and ask for asylum. For their
efforts at being 'above board' - that is, presenting
themselves to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) - they
are welcomed to freedom in America through its prison system.
While this may stimulate the privatised prison-industrial
economy, it is first and foremost an extension of human rights
abuses shouldered by refugees.

In detention, they discover legal-dilemma redux: many of the
same problems that stalled the refugee process in Sudan follow
them to the United States. They are possibly terrorists, or
implicated in persecution and human rights abuses; they are
cowardly deserters of a sovereign state's military; and of
course, they are always criminals for having the audacity to
migrate illegally. But had the legal refugee process been
responsive to actual human circumstances, such illegality
would be far less likely.

...

My goal is to illustrate the complexity and global scope of
human rights dilemmas that structure refugees' lives, and the
failures of institutions, policies and laws designed to manage
them as technical problems rather than protect them as human
beings. It is not enough to simply address the human rights
violations that lead people to become refugees at the source,
crucial as that may be. All along the way, refugees face
multiple and nested issues that are sometimes endemic and even
actively produced or aggravated by the very systems designed
to protect them.

While earthquakes, tsunamis, nuclear accidents, and
revolutions may be dramatic and momentous events, it is worth
remembering that their wrenching daily equivalency plays out
in political and humanitarian disasters like that of Eritrea's
refugees, more invisible than the radiation seeping into the
Pacific but no less poisonous for those affected. As Eritreans
mark the 20th anniversary of their revolution, any thoughts of
Egypt or Libya will focus on the lives of loved ones lost in
the Sinai or Sahara, or those whose fates are yet unknown.
Their suffering, and the ripples of despair that radiate
throughout the lives of their families and compatriots, is
fallout from Isayas Afwerki's dictatorial rule. But it is also
fallout from the international community's failed, inadequate,
and draconian migration policies and laws. The fallout has not
only reached our shores - it also originates there. What comes
around goes around. Human lives are the currency we use to pay
for the failures of modernity. ??

Milan - Nato and its member countries should conduct a full
investigation into allegations of failure to rescue a disabled
boat filled with migrants fleeing Libya, Human Rights Watch
said today.

The boat, carrying seventy-two people including two babies,
apparently drifted for two weeks in the Mediterranean before
landing back in Libya on April 10, 2011, despite distress
calls and sightings by a military helicopter and what appeared
to be an aircraft carrier. Only nine people survived, one of
them told Human Rights Watch.

Human Rights Watch interviewed both the survivor and a priest
based in Rome who was briefly in contact with the passengers
by telephone.

"What could NATO have done to prevent these people from
dying?" said Judith Sunderland, senior Western Europe
researcher at Human Rights Watch. "We need an investigation to
determine if, and how, this terrible tragedy could have been
averted."

Failure to rescue people on a boat in distress when it is
reasonable for a ship to do so is a serious breach of
international law, Human Rights Watch said. The president of
the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe called on
May 9 for an "immediate and comprehensive" investigation.

NATO has denied the charge that it ignored migrants in
distress at sea, saying it was unaware of the boat's plight. A
NATO spokesman in Brussels told Human Rights Watch that NATO
had looked into the matter with due diligence and found no
records of any contact with the boat, adding that no further
investigations are envisioned. But reviewing the paper trail
should only be the first step in a more in-depth inquiry,
including interviews with relevant personnel on ships in the
area at the time and at NATO command in Naples, Human Rights
Watch said.

The African governments whose citizens were in the drifting
boat - Ethiopia, Eritrea, Ghana, Nigeria, and Sudan - and the
African Union should press NATO and European governments to
conduct an immediate and comprehensive investigation into the
matter, Human Rights Watch said.

The survivor interviewed by Human Rights Watch, an Ethiopian
man named Abu Kurke, said the 11-meter boat left Libya on
March 25 with 72 people aboard. After about 19 hours at sea,
with fuel running low, he said, the passengers called an
Eritrean priest in Rome, Father Moses Zerai, for help.

Interviewed separately, Zerai, who runs a refugee rights
organization called Agenzia Habeshia, confirmed that he
received a phone call from the distressed passengers on the
boat. He told Human Rights Watch that he immediately alerted
both the Italian coast guard and NATO command in Naples. The
Italian coast guard confirmed to The Guardian newspaper that
it had sent out an alert to all vessels in the area. The NATO
spokesman said that NATO was unaware of any calls made to the
NATO command in Naples.

Kurke told Human Rights Watch by phone from Tripoli that at
some point after the phone call to Zerai, a helicopter with
the word "Army" in English written on it hovered above the
boat and dropped water and biscuits. He said the boat's
captain, a Ghanaian, decided to remain in the area, believing
the helicopter would send a rescue team, and used up the rest
of the boat's fuel. Kurke said the passengers also saw an
aircraft carrier and tried to communicate that they were in
distress, holding up the two babies and waving their arms. Two
jets took off from the aircraft carrier and flew over the
boat, Kurke said, but no help arrived.

The Guardian newspaper alleged on May 8 that the aircraft
carrier was probably the French ship Charles de Gaulle. French
naval authorities first denied that the carrier was in the
region at the time and then declined to comment further to the
newspaper. A NATO spokesman is quoted in The Guardian as
saying that NATO had no records of the incident, and that
"NATO ships will answer all distress calls at sea and always
provide help when necessary. Saving lives is a priority for
any NATO ships." It is unclear whether other NATO member
countries had navy ships in the area not operating under NATO
command.

NATO issued a statement indicating that the only aircraft
carrier under NATO command in the area on the dates in
question was the Italian Garibaldi, and that it was operating
over 100 nautical miles out at sea. "Any claims that a NATO
aircraft carrier spotted and then ignored the vessel in
distress are wrong," NATO said. The Brussels spokesman told
Human Rights Watch that NATO ships came to the assistance of
two boats in distress on the night of March 26 and 27,
providing food and water and alerting the Italian coast guard,
which subsequently rescued the boats.

The boat drifted for two weeks before the currents took it
back to Libya, Kurke told Human Rights Watch. Sixty-one
people, including all twenty women and two children aboard,
died at sea, he said. One man died shortly after reaching
Libya.

Libyan authorities detained the remaining 10 survivors for
several days, and one more man died while in custody, the
survivor told Human Rights Watch and The Guardian. The nine
survivors are still in Tripoli, hoping to reach Tunisia with
the assistance of a local Catholic church.

In early April, the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, called on all
vessels in the Mediterranean to consider all overcrowded boats
leaving Libya to be in distress. The rear admiral in command
of NATO maritime operations in the Mediterranean issued a
specific, classified order in early April calling for
heightened vigilance and efforts to rescue migrants trying to
flee Libya by sea, the NATO spokesman told Human Rights Watch.
NATO instructions are to provide immediate assistance -
medical, food, and water - to a boat in distress, alert the
competent coast guard, and wait to make sure the rescue
operation is initiated, the spokesman said.

Hundreds of sub-Saharan Africans have died fleeing Libya by
sea since the end of March. A boat carrying over 600 people
sank off the Libyan coast on May 7, with the death toll still
unclear. On April 6, over 200 people, including children, died
when their boat sank in Maltese waters.

As many as 800 more people who have left Libya by boat over
the past six to eight weeks are unaccounted for and presumed
dead.

"With a mounting death toll, all vessels in the Mediterranean,
including NATO forces and those of member countries, shouldn't
wait until a boat is sinking to intervene," Sunderland said.
"As more and more people attempt the crossing in overcrowded,
unsafe boats, all vessels in the area should assume
overcrowded migrant boats are in distress, come immediately to
their rescue, and take their passengers to safety."

Since late March, when the first wave of people began to flee
Libya by sea, more than 10,000 have reached Italy and over
1,000 have reached Malta. The vast majority are sub-Saharan
Africans. Thousands of migrants remain trapped in Libya,
unable to flee by land to neighboring countries.

...

The European Union (EU) also needs to do more to prevent
deaths at sea, Human Rights Watch said. In early April, EU
foreign ministers agreed to set up an EU military force for
Libya (Eufor Libya) for humanitarian action, including
evacuations by sea. No operations have been conducted,
however.

"There's been an awful lot of hand-wringing about a potential
massive influx of refugees from Libya, with Italy and Malta
bearing the brunt of rescue missions and reception of those
fleeing Libya by sea, but more has to be done to help people
reach safety without risking their lives," Sunderland said.
"To help prevent further deaths at sea, the EU as a whole
should show concrete solidarity and begin evacuating to Europe
migrants who are trapped by the violence."

AfricaFocus Bulletin is an independent electronic publication
providing reposted commentary and analysis on African issues,
with a particular focus on U.S. and international policies.
AfricaFocus Bulletin is edited by William Minter.

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